High speed packaging machinery is essential to meet large demands for consumer products in a market-oriented economy. As a consequence, there is a need for machinery that can satisfy mass market packaging requirements swiftly, inexpensively and without interruption. Machinery of this character also must satisfy further needs, among which, safe and reliable operation by relatively unskilled production personnel are typical.
Drawing labels from a preprinted roll and applying these labels to a row of articles that are moving along a production line at high speed is a relatively common production activity. Difficulties arise, however, in making a transition to a fresh roll of labels as the roll in use is depleted, and an illustrative apparatus for splicing a fresh roll of labels to a depleted roll is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,064,488, granted Nov. 12, 1991 to D. M. Dickey.
There are, however, further needs and among these is the need to reduce production costs by providing a splicing apparatus that does not require the presence of an attendant to initiate or help in the actual splicing process.
Label "registration" during roll changeover also is a most important matter. Thus, as a fresh roll of labels is fed into the packaging machinery, it is essential that each of these labels is severed from the web of labels that is drawn from the fresh roll precisely at the margin separating one label from the next label in the sequence on that web. Only a little imagination is required to picture the waste and expense that will result if labels are severed from a roll at some place other than at the predetermined line of severance and the labels, so mutilated, are applied to the articles moving along the production line.
To swiftly identify those articles in the array on the production line to which a spliced label has been applied is also quite important. The adhesive strip, ordinarily used to attach the leading label in the web drawn from a fresh roll to one of the last labels in the depleted roll, necessarily will be applied to one of the articles moving through the production line. The adhesive strip mars the appearance and salability of the article to which it is attached. For these reasons, the articles to which adhesive strips are applied must be identified and taken from the production line to permit the adhesive strip and the attached label to be removed from the article. After removal, the article is reinserted into the production line and a new label is applied. To locate one article to which an adhesive strip has been attached in an entire production run, however, is a painstaking and time consuming job.
There are, of course, any number of other criteria that a fully acceptable label splicing apparatus should meet. Maintenance and the number of moving parts in the apparatus, for example, should be minimal.
None of these requirements for an acceptable label splicing apparatus have been fully satisfied in the prior art. As a consequence, there still is a need for a more satisfactory apparatus that automatically detects a near-depleted condition in a roll of labels and causes a fresh label roll to be spliced to the web of labels that have been drawn from the end of the depleted roll. Further, completely adequate techniques to commence drawing labels from the fresh roll, while keeping these labels on the new web in registry with the last of the labels on the web from the depleted roll without introducing an undesirable interruption in production and clearly identifying the article to which the adhesive strip is attached also have not yet been provided.